The title of this exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre indicates the confidence
it deserves, says Alastair Smart

One of its famous sons, Alan Partridge, may have referred to East Anglia as “the plump peninsula, home of the Broads, Albion’s hind quarters or, quite simply, the Wales of the East”. But on the evidence of this cracking exhibitionat the Sainsbury Centre, there’s a lot more to the area than that. It features some 280 objects produced in – and/or inspired by – East Anglia over the millennia.

The most ancient work is the 700,000-year-old Happisburgh handaxe, found on a Norfolk beach by a casual dog-walker in 2000. Knapped from black flint for a range of cutting, chopping and butchery tasks, it’s in remarkably recognisable condition for one of Britain’s oldest artefacts. In a neat juxtaposition, it is displayed beside Henry Moore’s small Reclining Figure, of 1930, carved from an ironstone pebble he’d found on the very same Happisburgh beach while on holiday.

Chronologically, the two pieces (more or less) bookend the show, which features paintings, ceramics, photos, jewellery, fashion and much else besides. Holbein’s portraits of the dukes of Suffolk jostle for attention with the illustrated Bury Bible of 1135, and Jacob Epstein’s bronze bust of Albert Einstein (from the scientist’s brief transit in Roughton en route from Nazi Germany to America).

This show raises all sorts of interesting questions. For instance, which other region could exhibit an array of artistic delights such as this? Northumbria perhaps (if anyone still recognises it as a territory)? The West Country (assuming we’re allowed to include Wiltshire)? I suppose dreary, politically correct, social historians would tell us each region’s cultural heritage is as important as any other’s. But where’s the fun in that? Credit to the Sainsbury Centre for having both the confidence and old-school competitive spirit to put on a show like this – with a title like this, to boot. There’s undeniable hubris, if also accuracy, in calling it Masterpieces.

In recent decades, gold jewellery from the Late Bronze Age has been discovered all across Norfolk – including rings, torcs, dress-pins and an elegant bracelet on show here from Sporle, once belonging to a local noblewoman.

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Another highlight is a silver pepper-pot from the early fifth century, a statuette depiction of Hercules wrestling with the Libyan giant Antaeus, striving with all his might to lift his opponent up, for the latter retained invincibility as long as his feet were on the ground. Part of the so-called “Hoxne hoard” of late Roman treasures, it’s testament to the wealth of its erstwhile owners: pepper was hugely expensive, grown not in Suffolk, Britain or anywhere in the Roman empire and needing to be imported from India.

As impressive as many of the artworks are the stories behind them. For example, the Despenser Retable, commissioned by the Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, to mark the suppression of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. A five-panel Crucifixion altarpiece from Norwich cathedral, it survived the ecclesiastical vandalism of Henry VIII’s Reformation by being upturned by a canny cleric and put to use as a workbench. It kept its disguise until someone dropped a tool under it in the mid-19th century and looked up to behold its miraculous treasure.

Elsewhere, there’s the bronze head of Emperor Claudius and accompanying bronze fragment of a horse’s leg, both believed to have been part of a huge equestrian statue of the emperor at his temple in Colchester. After the Roman stronghold was sacked in AD 60, it’s suggested Boudica’s Iceni rebels carried chunks of the destroyed statue back to their East Anglian homeland and buried them at the bottom of a river in thanks to their gods.

The region’s artistic heights can, in part, be explained by simple geography, with a location ensuring it served as a thriving conduit between Britain and mainland Europe. Occupied continually from prehistory onwards, successive waves of incomers (Celts, Romans, Angles, Vikings, Normans etc) have continually reinvigorated local culture.

The celebrated Norwich School painters, however, appeared at a time when East Anglia itself was in decline: at the turn of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution was sucking wealth away from this agricultural heartland. Continental influence still ran deep, though, specifically that of the Dutch landscapists, Hobbema and Ruisdael (whose lowland terrain matched much of East Anglia’s own). Worthiest of note is John Crome: his Poringland Oak (1818) – strong, dignified and constant – might well be considered a portrait of the whole region.

And then, of course, came the most famous landscapist of all, John Constable. His visions of his native Suffolk are a masterful marriage of the naturalistic and romantic, achieved in part because the county – so gentle, meadowy and untouched by industry – was chocolate-box Britain made real.

As for 20th-century “masterpieces”, there’s a remarkable portrait by a 17-year-old Lucian Freud of Cedric Morris, his tutor at art school in Dedham. Morris’s blacked-out left eye suggests that, even as a young man, sitters struggled to return Freud’s penetrating gaze.

One glaring omission from the show, alas, is the ship-burial helmet from Sutton Hoo (around which the British Museum will launch its new Anglo-Saxon galleries shortly). There are also a few exhibits with, at best, a tenuous link to the region: James Dyson may have been born in Cromer, for example, but is there anything particularly East Anglian about his vacuum cleaners?

Yet, these are relatively minor quibbles about a treasure trove of an exhibition – one of which this review has merely scratched the surface.